Few marketers doubt the importance of a strong brand for a firm’s success. But a lot of marketers think about their brands in fewer dimensions than they ought to. Everyone realizes that logo and color schemes are important.

The Guardian Hashtag politics: seven top tips for civil servants using social media The Guardian The rise of social media has brought with it a goldrush, with numerous companies and social media consultants offering "social listening" technologies,...

Wall Street Journal (blog)England Prosecutors Take New Look at Social MediaWall Street Journal (blog)“They make a clear distinction between communications which amount to credible threats of violence, a targeted campaign of harassment against an individual...

Dimitra Kontochristou's insight:

Got a long way until we manage communication through social media. The question remains: tools are evolving more rapidly than we can react by shaping our habbits and our way of using them!

“And that's the grand dilemma of social networking: it's intended to allow participation, to let companies and individuals all engage and interact, but a...

As we have progressed, not only in our use of technology but also our understanding of effective leadership, we know that communication includes effective talking but, more importantly, listening. Being able to hear what is being said from those we serve is extremely important to how we develop our schools, and the conversation is extremely valuable. Yet, many schools and organizations use social media in the old fashion: sharing information but not having a conversation. In reality, just because you have ears doesn’t mean you are listening.

Hi Ana, thx very much! Looks like You had seen my Tweet about lack of knowledge about Social Media with Government and prompt there is a nice article from Ana to amplify my message ;) Have a great week-end :)

A specialized wiki could help patients play a part in developing clinical practice guidelines, according to a study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, FierceHealthIT reports.

About the Study

For the study, researchers from the Netherlands developed a wiki about infertility treatment that initially included 90 recommendations based on interviews with 12 patients.

Researchers then invited additional patients to participate in the wiki. Over a seven-month period, the wiki received 298 unique visitors and expanded to include 289 recommendations.

A guideline development group then assessed the value of the recommendations.

Main Findings

In the wiki, patients described several challenges related to the infertility treatment process, including:

A lack of evening hours at treatment centers; Having to wait in the same room as pregnant women; and Concerns about gynecologists' "lack of empathy."

According to the researchers, the level of participation in the project suggests that the wiki was a "promising and feasible" tool to involve patients in clinical practice guideline development.

Recommendations

To further refine such medical wikis, the researchers recommended:

Automatically reducing the number and shortening the length of the recommendations; Developing a standard format for recommendations; Adding a separate motivation page where patients could describe their reasoning for a recommendation; and Paying more attention to the informational character of the wiki (Bird, FierceHealthIT, 10/29).

Imagine walking into a busy mall when someone approaches you with an open hand. “Would you have some coins to take the bus, please?” he asks. But in this case, the person is not a panhandler. The beggar is a PhD.

Flowboard is a storytelling and presentation app that allows creating side-scrolling publications with the help of photos, videos, text and photo galleries. Whether you are looking to tell your story in the form of your personal photo collection, wish to share ideas or require creating and presenting a presentation right from your iPad, Flowboard can help you get the job done without requiring the use of PowerPoint or Keynote.

I have scooped Flowboard before but I thought you may like to read this article about creating presentations on your iPad (iOS 6 or higher) where you will find some great tips for working with Flowboard.

The simultaneous maturation of patient-centered healthcare, social media and the Internet has created what researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School are calling a "perfect storm" in healthcare with regard to how patients and organizations connect.

What is social productivity? Achieving better time management and efficiency through social media rather than e-mail communication.Try these three lessons:1. Shift the conversation — by yourself. In 2008, Suarez began replying to e-mails with messages on Connections, Twitter, or Google+. That way, he only had to address certain topics once. For repeat queries, he could simply refer the askers to his publicly posted answers. The takeaway: Don’t answer e-mail with e-mail — respond in the social medium where your reply will get the most mileage.2. Try an e-mail fast. Intel, according to FT.com, has “experimented with ‘no-e-mail Fridays,’ encouraging engineers to solve problems by phone or face-to-face instead.” You could try the same thing, adding social tools to the list of e-mail alternatives.3. Give it time. At Klick, a 200-employee marketing consultancy, the staff only uses e-mail for external communication. “Internally all messages go through Genome, its self-designed system,” notes FT.com.The rub: “It can be initially hard for new employees to get used to the system, with some taking months to start fully using [it].”

Dimitra Kontochristou's insight:

I'd go for lesson #2 for starters! Collaboration through divisions just blasts if you get to kill emails and go for some serious contact (sm included!)

Based on the more rigorous surveys and reports, it’s still true that clinicians are generally more eager adopters of both mobile devices and the medical apps that run on them. The persistent challenge for many iPad-toting physicians, however, is where to turn for medical app recommendations. In its efforts to be at least somewhat helpful on that front, Apple has slightly reworked and beefed up its now more visible section of “Apps For Healthcare Professionals”, which appears to be consistently featured in the AppStore’s medical section.

This article is about the structure of pharma’s sales organisations and the importance of retaining star talent.

In part one of two, Marie Crespo, CEO of SalesAssessment.com, explains why understanding your sales talent’s performance potential is fundamental to your business model.

The last few years have placed pharma sales firmly under the spotlight. Indeed, some commentators are suggesting that the whole business model needs to undergo a revolution.

A recent article in Forbes1 argued that pharmaceutical companies should look to other industries for inspiration and, for instance, learn from IBM’s story in the 1990s. As the hardware market commoditised, IBM transformed its product-centric culture to one focused on customers and services. Author Dave Chase writes: ‘Remarkably, IBM demonstrated how it’s possible for a large company to shift from a product-centric culture to a customer and service-centred company. The handwriting is on the wall for pharma companies: they will succeed or fail based not on how many drugs they sell, but on how well their offerings improve health outcomes.’

He asked: ‘Do pharmaceutical companies see themselves in the drug business or the disease management business? Or, where possible, in the disease prevention business?’

A major part of any transformation for pharmaceutical companies will involve creating new relationships with partners and drawing on the depth of engagement they have with the market, albeit that their sales force’s access to providers has already been dramatically limited.

For an increasing number of patients, it is difficult to make an appointment with a doctor or other healthcare provider. This is due to a patient's decreased mobility or lack of time. The eHealth application FaceTalk provides the solution.

Perhaps, as physicians increasingly experiment with social media technologies, these tools may provide an efficient and effective means for staying abreast of the vast amount of medical knowledge required to deliver patient care. This might be transformative in medicine, as traditional lecture-based continuing medical education has been shown to be largely ineffective in changing physician behavior at the same time that medical knowledge is changing at the fastest pace in history [21-23]. Social media technologies could complement (or even replace) continuing medical education for physicians as either an informal or formal learning channel [24-26]. But for now, how social media channels are the vehicles through which physicians are exposed to emerging information that has the potential to inform or change practice remains an open question [27,28].

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.